MovieWeb has interviewed Howard Berger. This is a very good interview that I’m sure you’ll all enjoy. Take a look at the excerpt below, and click on the source link to read the whole thing.
On a film like The Chronicles of Narnia, do you come in with specific ideas for how you want the film to look? Do you read the script and then go, “Where do I begin?” Or, did you draw a lot from the C.S. Lewis book?
Howard Berger: Well, it’s a lot of everything to tell you the truth. What we did was, WETA Workshop in New Zealand, Richard Taylor’s company, had been hired almost a year and a half prior to our involvement. So they had done a lot of design work and conceptual artwork for Andrew Adamson, so when we came on that was already there, but we needed to still take that artwork and redesign it to kind of fit in the real world. It was a combination of illustrations from the original book and WETA’s original artwork.
The two big things for me were Andrew Adamson’s recollection of the characters in the book when he was a child and he read it. That was a really, really big influence and I wanted to recreate that world that was in his mind when he was small; and also my three children had a lot to do with it because they were such gigantic fans of the book. I did not want to disappoint them and I utilized their imagination and their purity as far as designing a lot of the characters as well.
How much of this movie were you on the set?
Howard Berger: I was on set every single day. We prepped in LA, here at KNB EFX for six months, then I took off to New Zealand and I was there for eight months. I was on set every single day. (Laughs)
Which character was your personal favorite to design makeup for?
Howard Berger: I had two that I really, really loved. The Narnia inhabitants are basically broken up into two groups. There’s the good guys being Aslan’s camp and the bad guys being the White Witch’s camp. I’d say on the good guy’s side, Mr. Tumnus was by far my favorite. I loved Mr. Tumnus. He was also the most difficult for me. He was the first character to film on the show and it was a lot of hard work. Once Andrew had hired James McAvoy, I felt a lot easier about it. I felt James was Mr. Tumnus.
As far as bad guys go, I loved General Otmin who was the White Witch’s Minotaur; big, giant, black Minotaur. I just think he’s so supercool and I remember sitting on set with him on the first day going, “I love this creature. It’s so awesome looking. It’s such a great combination of everything I love. He’s got a little bit of buffalo, he’s got a little bit of gorilla, he’s kind of apish and best of all he’s very Where the Wild Things Are.”
[Read the rest at MovieWeb]
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